I'd need to know what you mean by manipulative and why it seems negative in this context, I apologize because I feel like that might seem sort of pedantic but e

I'd need to know what you mean by manipulative and why it seems negative in this context, I apologize because I feel like that might seem sort of pedantic but education as a field has a very large collection of practices that could easily be described as manipulation. At the same time, I'm worried manipulation seems like the right word because I've been focusing mainly on surprise content to establish a fast example for the discussion even though what I've really been trying to drive at is the way that trigger warnings and their implementation/expection impacts the teacher-student dynamic. I think in general we agree that most lessons don't really need to be surprising, emotionally provacative, etc. But the reason I've been focusing on those examples is because it's not too hard to understand why a professor might choose to employ them situationally (the basic answer being showmanship that drives engagement of some sort). A similar but very different example would be something like a Sex & Gender course, I've only taken a few such courses but the first one really stuck with me because one of the early assignments was simply for students to break into same sex (technically gender presentation but we didn't know that concept yet) groups of two and hold hands in public with our partner for ten minutes. I could certainly see an argument for giving someone with a history of abuse a pass on this assignment but should the instructor have included a trigger warning in their syllabus calendar about it? The point of the assignment, as the professor acknowledged, was in part to make us uncomfortable and aware of how our discomforts might be tied to social prejudice. You're right of course that this is all just theory. Real life is, well, it's real life it's nuanced and expecting some amount of situational accommodation isn't something I'm against. After all, if a professor offers office hours why shouldn't a student be able to use that time as part of how they work around content that's emotionally challenging for them? At the same time, and I guess what I should have led with in retrospect, my issue with a lot of solutions about trigger warnings or even just content consideration in general is that it's presented as a victimless accommodation when the dynamic from the instructor's side seems to favor watering down content for the entire class so that you don't have to sift through the chafe so to speak. I don't know what a good middleground solution is, and I do think it's worth pursuing one, but as far as trigger warnings specifically I don't think the benefits have been shown to be worth the trade.